Perl 5 Porters Weekly: May 6-12, 2013

Welcome to Perl 5 Porters Weekly, a summary of the email traffic of the
perl5-porters email list. The big news this week is the release of
perl-5.18.0-RC1 and RC2.

Topics this week include:

perl-5.18.0-RC2 is now available

Proposal: initial type annotation in SV

What does PERL_HASH_SEED do?

Designing an API

Should we make hashes return keys in FIFO order?

Release timing drift

perl-5.18.0-RC2 is now available

Fire up perlbrew: 5.18.0-RC2 is here. Time to test all your modules
against this release candidate! The perldelta also makes great
reading - all the stuff that's new and different. Some highlights
include the hash ordering changes, experimental lexical subroutines,
Unicode 6.2 support, given aliasing global $_ and a metric
ton of bug fixes in the /(?{})/ and /(??{})/ regex constructions.

David Golden points out that perl releases seem to be drifting
further back in the year than earlier yearly releases. He proposes
moving freezes forward a month so blockers can be resolved with
less urgency.